James Grippando - Need You Now

Our bar talk had drifted well away from Ponzi schemes and bank secrecy, and I lost count of the empty shot glasses. Tequila had been known to loosen my tongue, and regrettably I found myself confessing that thoughts of Lilly had crossed my mind whenever I heard Lady Antebellum singing “Need You Now.” This she found even more hilarious than bird shit on my head. There’s a line in the song about being a little drunk, and we definitely were, so we sang our own rendition on the way back to my place, adjusting for the fact that we didn’t really care what time it was:

… a quarter after something / I’m out of milk / and I need your cow.

Okay, so we were more than a little drunk.

My apartment was on the third floor. After several stabs at the keyhole, I managed to unlock the door and get us inside. It occurred to me that the first woman to visit my New York apartment was the same woman who had dumped me in Singapore, but there was no time to appreciate the irony. It took longer to find the light switch than to end up in the loft, though the decision wasn’t completely without discussion.

“Should we do this?”

“Yes.”

“You make a very persuasive argument.”

Knew I shouldn’t call / but I’ve lost all my clothes / and I need your towel.

The rest was a blur, which was a shame. I’d experienced “make-up sex,” before, but this was better than make-up sex, since I wasn’t just mad at Lilly; I had actually lost her. That put us in the realm of reunion sex, a rare combination of the excitement of a first-time lover with the joy being with someone who knows exactly what you like. This was one of life’s greatest pleasures-and I was bumbling my way through it on too much tequila. Suffice it to say that it wasn’t our best performance-far short of our Chinese Sound of Music watershed-but Lilly fell asleep in my arms, and all was well.

For an hour or so, anyway.

The pain in my neck-literally-woke me. I sat up in bed and gave the burning sensation a minute to subside. Lilly was sleeping soundly, and it was nice to see the curve of her body beneath the bedsheet beside me. Morning couldn’t possibly have come so soon, and a check of the clock confirmed that the night was still young: 8:38 P.M. I quietly rolled out of bed, took a quick shower, and went to the dresser. We’d left a lamp burning downstairs, and it provided just enough of a glow for me to move around the loft without stubbing a toe. My overnight suitcase was packed when Lilly finally stirred.

“Wow,” she said as she rose up on her elbow. “I’ve heard of guys dashing off after sex, but I must be the first girl in New York to send a man running from his own apartment.”

I went to her side of the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. “I was supposed to be on a seven o’clock flight out of LaGuardia. If I hurry I can catch a later one.”

“Do you really have to go?”

I nodded. “It’s just for a day. I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

“How will I reach you? Your phone’s in the garbage.”

“I still have my BlackBerry,” I said. Everyone on my team had both an iPhone and a BlackBerry, as the head of BOS security had laid down the law that a bank-issued BlackBerry was the only way to access the bank’s e-mail system.

“I guess I’ll be okay,” she said.

Even in the dim light, I could see the concern on her face. She’d spent the previous three nights in a hotel on Eighth Avenue, and I sensed that she didn’t want to go back. “You can stay here, if you want.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, this is a very secure building. You’ll feel safer.”

“Safe is good. Apart from that… are you sure?”

She was giving me an out, but after what had happened to me that afternoon, it would have taken a total jerk to say, On second thought, go sleep in your hotel room and see if anyone comes knocking in the middle of the night.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

She kissed me and smiled. “I’ll go over to the hotel in the morning and check out. I only have one suitcase, so don’t worry about me taking over your closet.”

My mouth opened, but no words came. “Uhhhh,” was all I could say. My invitation had been for tonight only. Although I wasn’t dead set against her staying longer, there was still too much left unsaid between us to know where we were headed.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “I think my head is starting to throb from all that tequila.”

“I hope it doesn’t explode on the airplane.”

“What airplane?”

“The one you’re trying to catch.”

“Right. That one. I’d better get going.”

She pulled me toward her, looking me in the eye. “It’s true what I told you at Puffy’s,” she said. “When I found out I was under investigation for helping Cushman hide his money, my biggest fear was that they’d lock me up in a third-world jail and throw away the key before I was even charged with a crime. I had to get out of Singapore.”

“I understand.”

“What I’m trying to say is that I couldn’t stay in Singapore. But I didn’t have to come to New York.” She blinked twice, as if to underscore, in a tender way, what she was telling me. “Now I’m glad I did.”

I was tempted to climb right back into bed with her. “Me, too,” I said.

We kissed good-bye, and I slipped away. I grabbed my overnight bag, gave Lilly one last look, and went downstairs. My coat was on a hook in the foyer, along with an extra key to the apartment.

“Lilly,” I said in a voice loud enough to carry upstairs, “there’s an extra key right by the-”

“I saw it,” she called out.

You did?

“Hurry back,” she said.

I made sure the door was locked when I left. My thoughts and emotions swirled as I headed down the hall to the elevator. I was glad to have Lilly back, and it was good that she’d filled in some of the biggest blanks for me at Puffy’s. At that particular moment, however, I was mostly relieved that Lilly hadn’t asked too many questions about my trip.

That 7:00 P.M. business flight had been a complete fabrication, and I wasn’t on my way to LaGuardia. I hated lying to Lilly, and if she’d pressed for details, I would have been forced to come up with an even bigger one.

No way could I have told her that I was going to see Tony Mandretti.

J oe Barber watched the eleven o’clock financial report from bed. Even with the volume blasting, he could barely hear the television over the noise of his wife pounding the treadmill.

She’d been fitness crazed since her fortieth birthday, but the late-night routine hadn’t begun until after her husband’s first infidelity. It was the same drill every day: start drinking at noon, go to bed at ten, lie awake calculating the staggering number of calories in a bottle of Chardonnay, freak out, jump on the treadmill, and punish her body until midnight. Of course their seven-bedroom estate in Greenwich had an exercise room, but after three years in Washington, Vanessa was still getting reacquainted with her old house. Their first night back, Vanessa had been so drunk that she’d fallen down the stairs. It was a miracle that she hadn’t broken her neck. Moving the treadmill into the master suite was easier than caring for a quadriplegic wife, even if he did have to stomach the nauseating smell of alcohol exuding from her pores every night.

“Joe, that’s your new bank they’re talking about!”

Barber raised the volume. A further expected drop in the price of BOS stock in tomorrow’s markets was the lead story on Financial News Network. “Investors are clearly wary,” the FNN reporter stated, “seemingly unconvinced that the bank’s settlement with the Department of Justice marks the end of the assault on bank secrecy.”